It was certainly a milestone project for us ’cause it was the first big zoological project that we undertook, that was really for us of huge magnitude because until then we had the big horn on the hill. We had a couple of fenced enclosures for gazelles and Oryx and we had our little small animal building and some coyotes and that was it. And so, the basic design concept was mine from the fact of where I wanted to put it in the park, which was at that point as far away from the entrance to the park, as you could get, because I thought it would do two things. It would give me a chance to build a restroom out there and an inside area to get people out of the heat so that they finally, when they walked all the way down there, they had a potty to go to and they could get into some air conditioning before they had to walk all the way back through that heat. It was laid out primarily in my mind from visions I’d created from looking at institutions in a lot of riches, Arizona Sonora Desert Museum’s layout of just fitting the thing into the habitat because it was designed however, to do comparative evolution. We did fennec and kit fox, we did caracal and bobcat as well as others, and then we had to have place for, I wanted Mexican wolves because it was an endangered species. Merv Larson by that point had not only left the museum, but had also left the Larson Company as well, and sold the Larson Company and he was down in Mexico, and I drug him out of Mexico. He was still consulting for the Larson Company at that point and I drug him up from Mexico and I said, “Come on Merv.” And we designed the basic thing on a couple of pieces of envelope from what I wanted and the terrain, and I really had to have architectural designs.
